This last remark, however, must not be allowed to mislead us. We must not imagine that the chronological sketch which has been here attempted of the development of Christian art has been in any way suggested by a consideration of what was likely to have been its course in consequence of the history of the Christian society. The sketch is really the result of a very careful induction from the laborious researches which De Rossi has made into the chronology of the several parts of the Catacombs; and if there proves to be a correspondence between the successive variations of character in the works of art that are found there, and the natural progress of the Christian mind or the outward condition of the Christian Church, these are purely “undesigned coincidences,” which may justly be urged in confirmation of our conclusion, though they formed no part of the premisses. We may venture also to add, that the conclusions were as contrary to the preconceived opinion of their discoverer as of the Christian world in general. Nothing but the overwhelming evidence of facts has forced their acceptance; but from these there is no escape. When it was found that the oldest _areæ_ in the cemeteries are precisely those that are richest in paintings, and those in the best style, whereas in the more modern _areæ_ the paintings are less in number, poorer in conception, and inferior in point of execution, it was impossible not to suspect the justice of the popular belief, that the infant Church, engaged in deadly conflict with idolatry, had rejected all use of the fine arts, and that it was only in a later and less prudent age that they had crept, as it were, unobservedly into her service; and as fresh and fresh evidence of the same kind has been multiplied in the course of the excavations, a complete revolution has at length been effected in public opinion on this matter. Even Protestant writers no longer deny that, from the very first, Christians ornamented their subterranean cemeteries with painting; only they insist that this was done, “not because it was congenial to the mind of Christianity so to illustrate the faith, but because it was the heathen custom so to honour the dead.” If by this it is only meant that Christians, though renewed interiorly by the grace of baptism, yet continued, in everything where conscience was not directly engaged, to live conformably to the usages of their former life, and that to ornament the tombs of the dead had been one of those usages—it is, of course, quite true. Nevertheless it is plain from the history that has here been given, that the earliest essays of Christian art were much more concerned with illustrating the mysteries of the faith than with doing honour to the dead.